The Obama Illusion and an Election Postmortem

So...what now?

Right?

There are too many things to get to after an election night like the one last week. If you value dignity and decency, the thinking on "our" side goes, then this was a catastrophic night where the world we thought we lived in crumbled down slowly around our heads.

Sounds a bit melodramatic, no?

It should. In hindsight the signs were all there.

Electing Barack Obama was not the norm, it was the capturing-lightning-in-a-bottle moment when the world we wanted came into being for a brief moment. An electrifying and brilliant orator, a charismatic and charming young guy---a black guy even---a fucking cool guy came along and snagged the moment and was the world.

Nevermind he was as white as he was black. And some of his policies were not favorites of mine. But, hell, he got a pass on most of those things in my book because he was the man. He was given a broken down mess and he did his damnedest to fix it. He got troops out of the Middle East (mostly), he watched Seal Team 6's Go-Pro as they shot Osama bin Laden in the goddamn face, he took on healthcare and got 22 million more people insured (with mixed results I hear).

But he represented The Future. He was The Future.

But we can't ignore the general trajectory of this country in the years between the last "cool guy" to leave the White House in Jimmy Carter.

Reagan, Bush I, Slick Willy, and Dubya. Yikes. The lone Democrat on the list did a bang up job finishing the dismantling of the social safety net started by Reagan. And he got impeached!

I had been saying during this campaign that Donald Trump was the exact candidate the Republicans deserved, seeing as they have been pandering to the worst in people for so long, but especially hard since the Karl Rove/Dubya years. Trump was the logical result of that direction.

Stages of Grief

When I saw everyone at work on Wednesday dressed in black, like somebody had died, it made me feel a little better. A person wasn't what we mourned, rather an idea. Our idea of what America was, or is...what we thought we could love about it. The idea of "Looking Forward" was met with the guillotine.

Corrie and I didn't watch the results like normal people. We put it on in between episodes of Nurse Jackie, but it was pretty clear what was happening. "Cass deserves better than this shit," Corrie was saying. "Weren't we past this? Wasn't George Dubya enough for you assholes?" she yelled at the television. Obviously, eh, No and No.

As for Cass deserving better...

He's a baby and will be nearing kindergarten by 2020. Norm asked me about the election back in July when we visited Sacramento and I told him that Trump is the bastard the Republicans deserve and if he somehow wins, then he's bastard we all deserve.

That "somehow wins" part...that's a sticky wicket...

Getting Perspective

One thing helping me with perspective at this moment are my charges. They have some ridiculous notions about what the future holds for them.

Some are convinced that Trump is sending death squads to come and kill them within 9 months. Some are convinced that martial law will be declared just so law enforcement will be allowed to shoot anyone on sight. 

What?

I mean, it'll get worse before it gets better, but death squads and martial law?

Then I realize that these kids don't come to these conclusions in a bubble, and how have we, as adults, been talking about this election? Has it been reasonable?

I let my kids talk about it for as long as they wanted. But I realized that they've only really known Obama as President. They were born after 9/11 for the most part (!!!) and have no real connection to the dark days in the years after that and before that magical November night in 2008 that I wrote about as one of the first posts ever on this site, A Beautiful Sight.

They've only ever known the country as the Land of Opportunity, and hear about the Land of Oppression in history class or on the news with the police shootings. This makes it a little more real for them.

Treating "Them" as Jokes

Raise your hand if "Trump Voter" was a thing of ridicule for you, was a stereotype of a redneck bigot. Hillary and the Democrats never took Trump, or his supporters, seriously. I know I didn't, and I'm not a Democrat or a die-hard Hillary backer.

Apparently some of those supporters were working class folks for whom the alienation from the political machine is fucking real. Millions of working-class people who voted for Obama did not vote for Hillary---they either voted for Trump or stayed home.

These were the people Bernie Sanders referenced in a recent interview. He said it was simply shameful that the Democratic party lost these voters. He also spoke to the clarion call put out by Trump: "I, [insert your name], alone will help you. I alone will bring you work. I will do it."

Of course it's all bullshit, but people were serenaded. That's what the Democrats never get.

The Electoral College

When was the last time a Republican won a popular vote? Was is Bush in '88 or Bush in '04? It looks like it was Democrats Clinton in '92, '96, Gore in '00, Obama in '08 and '12 and Clinton again in '16.

At least we have that, right?

President Orange Roughy

So...sitting in the White House will be a person who has no domestic policy experience, no foreign policy experience, no education plan, and no healthcare plan beyond undoing the Affordable Care Act. The person is openly hostile to environmental activists, minorities, and women. He's groped women, bragged about it, and bragged about how some women aren't attractive enough to grope. He lost nearly a billion dollars in a single year, so we know he just great at business.

His campaign was full of bombastic calls about interning and kicking out 12 million people and banning an entire religion from entering the United States. His own supporters who weren't confederate flag waving mouth-breathers have said things like (in NPR interviews), "Oh, he doesn't mean those things, he's just trying to be outlandish."

Do you know what that means, Trump-voter? That means you recognize he's a demagogue, and that's something you like about him! I guess being a demagogue is better than being the next Hitler...

When the best thing you can say is: this politician is a demagogue, things don't look so hot.

Don't get me started on Mike Pence, the let's-defund-AIDS-research-and-pour-money-into-coversion-therapy asshat.

And what does "Make America Great Again" really even look like? Should it be "Make America White Again"? Are there going to be new jobs magically arriving? Maybe a complete destruction of NAFTA and super high tariffs on Chinese imports will spawn those gigs. For what it's worth, I can't say I'd fight that too hard.

What does a Trump presidency look like? Either Republican business as usual (we're all screwed); or crazy Hitler-esque Trump (we're all screwed, but worse); or do-nothing-pre-9/11-super-vacation-Bush (we're only as screwed as we are right now); or...or...I'm trying to figure out that one. I'll get back to you.

What really does it all mean?

For you Obama was either great or the devil or somewhere in between, but did he bring you groceries? Did he pay the gas bill? The day to day shenanigans that we all do, and have to do, are affected very little by the orange-faced turd-blossom person sitting in the Oval Office.

Did what we think we saw as the possibility of our country get squashed the other day?

Yup.

I think the silver lining is that after the dark Bush years and the hopeful Obama years that we actually expected the country to get it right. 

That's progress, right?

One Last Thing

What I told my kids that made me nervous for their future had little to do with what happened last Tuesday. It's what happens in 20 years, when the hundred million baby-boomers all begin to need Social Security and medicare, and our working class people are still living at home paying off college degrees that they can't use because the nice-pay middle-class work has disappeared.

What happens then? Especially if Trump dissolves Social Security even more, or privatizes it, or some other fuzzy-headed Republican idea...

I told my kids that at least one adult in their life needed to tell them about it, if only one.

Sounding the Big-Picture alarm...